Mortal Fear

“Your husband.”

“He’s a factor.”

“He’s more than that. He is afraid to have children with you. He ducks the question, changes the subject, pleads that it’s too much responsibility, asks you to wait until things are more stable.”

“Yes.”

“When could things be more stable? You earn a living in your own right. Your husband is a miser, isn’t he? Hoarding his gold like Midas?”

I feel like a demon just breathed on the back of my neck. Was Berkmann in the tunnel that night after all?

“Hiding in his office,”he goes on,“his sticky fingers glued to the keyboard, reading about other people’s sex lives over their shoulders, fawning over brainless starlets, masturbating for relief because he can’t face himself squarely enough to have a real relationship with you. What kind of man lives like that?”

“Didn’t he find you on EROS?” Drewe asks pointedly.

“Yes. But I was there for an altogether different reason.”

“Pineal glands?”

“Yes, but we must take things in order. First you must sever your husband from your life. From your being. Can you do that?”

“More easily than you know.”

“You deceive yourself. It’s never that easy. That is why I must tell you the rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your husband. Harper lured me to your home because Erin was trying to make him tell you the truth about Holly. Trying to save her marriage. But Harper couldn’t bear the truth. That’s why he sent me Erin’s picture, why he made sure Erin would be alone in your house when my assistant and I arrived. He told Erin he was thinking of leaving you, that he wanted to be a father to Holly, that he needed desperately to make love with her again. That’s why she came when she did. I didn’t come to kill her but to bring her back to share my life. But of course she knew nothing about that. When I arrived, she panicked. She stabbed my assistant, and my assistant killed her in self-defense. Despite my best efforts to save them, they both died. Harper got his wish.”

Drewe is staring at me again, her tearful eyes wide with horror. I shake my head violently and mouth“LIES!” but she has been shaken beyond reassurance.

“I didn’t see any sign that you tried to save Erin,” she says.

“You saw the wound. It was mortal.”

“You could have called nine-one-one.”

“No. The civil authorities are Philistines. They would chain Prometheus to a rock for stealing fire.”

“What are you talking about?”

“As I speak, please remember one thing. There are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena. Forget the arbitrary rules you learned as a child. Listen with your will, with your unfettered spirit….”

Berkmann begins telling the tale he told “Erin” days ago, but in a more condensed manner. If anything, the story is more powerful for its brevity. There’s no denying the poetry of his language as he speaks of Rudolf and Richard and Catherine-always Catherine-and Kali. Drewe interjects an occasional “yes” or “mmm,” but little else. As the minutes pass, I realize that Berkmann’s words are disturbing me on some fundamental level. What can they be doing to Drewe?

Pressing the phone hard against my ear, I hear a flurry of voices from Miles’s end. Then Miles says, “Harper!”

“I’m here.”

“The SWAT teams are moving into position. Snipers on the rooftops, the whole deal. Everybody says tell you to keep Berkmann at his computer.”

“He’s still talking to Drewe. Tell them to get the lead out. I don’t know how long she can take this.”

“SWAT’s on the phone with Baxter right now. He’s en route by car. They’re going in as soon as he gets here.”

“Okay.”

Berkmann’s tale is accelerating. He weaves the central thread of his life-his hemophilia-into a tale of almost mythic proportion. The illegal liver transplant that cost a life but “healed his great wound” sounds like part of a heroic quest. And through it all, his family looms like a mystical trinity, his mother a shining figure in the distance, his father walking beside him, his grandfather a shadow pursuing from behind.

“Harper!” Miles says in my ear.

“Right here.”

“Baxter just got out of a car. They’re escorting him like he’s General MacArthur. Hang on.”

I try to listen to the action through the phone while Berkmann begins speaking of what Drewe means to him. She listens as though nothing in his depraved history has shocked her in the slightest.

“Goddamn it!”Miles yells in my ear.

“What is it?”

“Baxter’s not letting me go in! The son of a bitch!”

“You didn’t think he would, did you?”

“He used me, man! The only reason I’m here is to make sure you keep Berkmann on-line.”

“So what! Tell me what’s happening.”

“Shit. It looks like a movie location. They don’t know where the computer is in the building, so they’re going to do both floors at once. The roof guys are going to crash through the windows on rappelling gear while guys on the ground blow the doors with plastique.”

“What about the hostages?”

“Baxter has paramedics standing- Wait, here he comes.”

Suddenly Daniel Baxter’s commanding voice comes through the phone. “Cole? Baxter.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“I don’t want another Dallas here. NYNEX shows computer data moving through one phone line at Berkmann’s warehouse. It looks like he’s on-line in there, but I don’t want him making an ass out of me and shooting cops from the windows. I want to hear you tell me Edward Berkmann is on-line right this second.”

Tired of playing middleman, I carry the phone across the room and hold it up to one of the computer’s speakers.

“Most women,”Berkmann is saying,“are water-engorged beings of stasis, eternally swelling and sloughing, draining men of life even as they produce more life. They are but corridors back to the grave. I have waited decades for a woman of fire and light-”

“You hear that?” I ask Baxter.

“That’s him?”

“That’s a digital facsimile of his voice speaking live to my wife.”

In a voice very like the one he used when directing the Dallas raid from Quantico, Baxter says, “Captain Riley, you are cleared to go.”

“How do you like that guy?” Miles asks, back on the phone. “He-”

Miles’s voice is terminated by four flat booms that can only be explosions.

CHAPTER 48

“SWAT just blew down the doors!” Miles shouts. “I’m in the command car with Baxter. I’ll tell you what’s happening as I hear it.”